Northern Ireland Assembly Elections: May 2017?

[ObserverIE]

The simplest solution is for the DUP to either get a new leader or support another of their members for First Minister. Are Mrs Foster and her party going to be so stubborn as to let the whole devolution settlement collapse rather than give up on one individual leader?

It's the DUP.

[ObserverIE]

So, where will be this election's Longford-Westmeath?

*waves nostalgically*

Not a clue. Not even Longford-Westmeath thought it was going to be Longford-Westmeath until the second day of the count.

Straws on the Twitter wind indicate that turnout is up but more so in mixed and Nationalist areas than in Unionist ones. Arlene may have made the mistake of kicking the sleeping dog once too often.

[ObserverIE]

Its interesting that while early on in the count everyone was doing down the SDLP calling it a terrible result; yet they've came out with the same number of seats in an Assembly that has been made smaller.  Just goes to show that we can't judge these things until all of the votes are counted...

Indeed, they did fine in the end, thanks to doing well on transfers (especially from the UUP) but the South Down and Foyle results, being comfortably beaten by Sinn Féin in both and having a scare from Alliance for their second seat in the former, must be worrying.  They still have a reasonable niche in STV elections but if people vote like they did on Thursday in a Westminster election (which they won't, but still...) they'd be facing wipeout.

The UUP were really hit in Nationalist-leaning areas by the reduction from six to five seats in each constituency.  Last year, four constituencies elected four Nationalists and two Unionists, in each case one DUP and UUP each, and in all of those four this time it was down to one Unionist and it was the UUP seat which disappeared.

Nationalist turnout had dropped over the last few elections. Brexit (do not underestimate the shock and worry about the future that Brexit is delivering to the middle-of-the-road in NI) and Arlene's general performance over the last few months motivated it to come out this time.

The lower Nationalist turnout and 6 seats per constituency had enabled Unionism to hold on in areas that the underlying demography no longer justified. What we don't know yet is how Unionism will react to its loss of majority status being brought home to it quite so graphically.

[ObserverIE]

Irt brexit it's fair to say the EU campaign was even more superficial than it was on GB (if you can believe that). Unionist parties only supported Brexit because of symbolism, and Nationalists only opposed it because Unionists supported it. That's how Ulster rolls.

Yeah, I'm really surprised how issues just become instantly communatarian in NI, like Israel-Palestine, abortion (ROI was pro-life for a long long time), the economic divide. I know this happens a lot elsewhere (see flair), but I've never seen it to this proportionality.

The RoI is still pretty strongly pro-life by European or North American standards. (And what comparative polling we've seen doesn't show a major gap in views on this issue between North and South, or within Northern Ireland.)

As far as Brexit goes, the only parties who I would have said took knee-jerk positions based on symbolism were the DUP and TUV (the Treaty of Rome would be enough for the TUV). PBP were against based on fantasies about Lexit and their own crackpot ideology laid down from SWP headquarters in London and paid for it last Thursday.

The UUP officially opposed Brexit for economic reasons; the SDLP, Alliance and the Greens have always been pro-European, and SF, who have been very critical in the past, were opposed because of the implications for the Border and the Good Friday Agreement.

[ObserverIE]

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And who do conservative Catholics (pro-lifers) vote for? Sinn Fein is rather secularist, even socialist, isn't it? The SDLP doesn't seem to be socially conservative either.

Both. The SDLP is a stubborn pro-life party with no exceptions, and Sinn Fein is only marginally more moderate on the issue.
But who votes on abortion in the UK? This isn't the US so please don't muddle yourself.

You get a small fringe of extreme pro-lifers (Precious Life and their ilk) who will vote DUP simply because of abortion and because they don't consider the SDLP absolutist enough on the issue. SF support broadening the legislation to deal with rape, incest and pregnancies where there is no chance of the baby surviving birth due to chromosomal abnormalities, although there are activists within it who are more fundamentally pro-choice.

The extreme pro-choicers (legal for any reason, and at any stage in pregnancy) support the Trots (PBP and the SP's front, Cross-Community Labour Alliance) or the Greens.

However, it's not a high-salience issue on either side of the border, despite a lot of media coverage. An opinion poll during last year's RoI election showed that 1% viewed it as the most important issue, increasing to 5% when the top three issues for voters were listed.

[ObserverIE]

My impression is that protestant voters who are "socially liberal" and where they value those social issues over the sectarian issue probably vote Alliance or Greens: maybe also the Trots where they are viable.

I don't see many Protestants voting for PBP; Carroll's surplus in West Belfast gave only a literal handful of votes to the unionist parties last time and the SWP/PBP is seen as being supportive of republicanism. The angels dancing on the pinheads of the SP/CCLA's theology are more Unionist-friendly ("Socialist Federation of the British Isles in a Socialist Federation of Europe") and its candidates have been in Protestant-majority areas with the recent exception of Fermanagh. So, yes, you might say that there are Catholic Trots and Protestant Trots.

[ObserverIE]

http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/cgi-bin/seatdetails.py?postcode=BT17+0SE

There are areas in the 2015 UK election in west belfast, in where other (PBP) does well, in many cases so does the DUP or the UUP.

Any reason for this? Is it due to living close to living with protestants, irish are more likely to vote for the non-sectarian leftist parties. The working class irish live more closely with working class protestnats, and the irish vote for People Before Profit.

?

Ehmmm....

Falls ward: UUP 111, SDLP 92, DUP 591, UKIP 27, Green 0, SF 448, PBP 673

Any set of figures which has the DUP outpolling SF (or even the SDLP) in Falls ward isn't worth a ****. The only figure that's remotely credible there is that Greens get zero since they didn't stand a candidate.

I don't know how he's calculating those figures, but they're completely unbelievable. There are tallies done in Northern Ireland but they're not done as thoroughly as in the Republic (for one thing, looking at the coverage on Friday, some of the counters will be too far away from the tallyers for the figures to be reliable) and they're not made public.